36.

What Joshua noticed first about this desert plain was the sun. The word "sun", it seemed, was really a dozen suns; there was tropical sun, places of sea and beach where it had a friendly happy character; there were suns seen in the mountains with their evergreens--these were majestic, exalted; they gave one a sense of grandeur. Then there were suns seen in lush green rainforest--mostly blocked by the canopy of leaves in these places; these suns stuck to your skin with their heat, omnipresent, sun found even in shade. There were suns over icy plains also--these were cold suns, suns that made you curse at them for providing no warmth--in these places whether one were in sunlight or shadow it was no different--the very sun was cold. And then there were the suns of deserts like this--suns that were the scourge of the land--every danger in these places: heat stroke, dehydration, exhaustion, exposure--every danger was due to this oppressive sun, every creature surviving, if it survived, only in spite of that sun.

There was a phantom in this desert, a phantom that spoke mechanically, in the way that computers speak. Do computers speak yet?--yes, computers speak, of course they do that now. Every word was haltingly brought forth from the phantom, like some electric typewriter that could only tap out letters at the same fixed pace, neither slowing nor quickening, without the elasticity that all living things share. Joshua did not quite see this phantom, nor did he quite not see her--it was a she, a female--he saw enough to know that, though he heard not a word, at least not with his ears.

"Have you ever thought that there may not have been such a thing as 'masculine' and 'feminine'?" asked the phantom. Joshua was unsure of what she meant by this, and things came to his mind having to do with more genetic variation issuing in nature from sexual reproduction, and other such intellectualized nonsense. The phantom read his thoughts, and in thoughts she replied: "But no--no. There is such a thing as 'the character of New Orleans' and 'the character of the feline' and a thousand such completely specific things that may not have ever been. That there are two sexes--yes, that would be--but that the male should have the character that he has, the female with her character as we have it--that came completely spontaneously, and on some other world these may have been so much otherwise." Joshua contemplated this, and it seemed to him that the masculine and feminine, in the way the spirit was using the words, was more fundamental than merely a flavor of some fruit that some being from some other world may not know. It wasn't the taste of a mango to one who had never tried mangoes. No--the masculine, the feminine were so caught up in what it was to be human they may as well have been mathematical entities such as the triangle and square and circle. It seemed to him that there must be a masculine and feminine--and yet the spirit was right--on some other world the two sexes may have characters as novel to us as our masculine and feminine are to the consciousness of worms. And there were a thousand such things, such elements of culture--and all those genres of painting which they say were discovered and not invented--Expressionism, Impressionism, Abstraction--yes, certainly every alien civilization the galaxy over had discovered Abstraction. And now the spirit said, . And now the spirit said, "Your paintings are to your blind mother what the character of Brooklyn would be to a crawfish." Then finally as the spirit retreated, and the scene of desert began to dissolve, it seemed to him that every sensation, every moment carried within itself a specific ineffable character as precise as what it was to be feline, what it was to be English or French. But now he became confused and cloudy-headed, and he was unsure what he earlier had been saying and thinking; so that he said, "This is not clear to me--what I was thinking is no longer clear--but this can be lovely too, and confusion can be delightful also."